I had a support case this week where it became apparent to me that there is no quick and easy way to test Essentials Servers for Configuration errors. Manually working through IIS or Certificates is prone to human error, as was proved to me, by me missing certain key things.

Uncharacteristically i decided to write a PowerShell script to save me from this sort of embarrassment in the future, and make me look really good next time i need to troubleshoot an Essentials Server.

You can download the tool from here, and am very interested to hear how it works for you.

If you have already downloaded it, i have updated the tool so you should download it again!

If so you may be forgiven for thinking that that ‘MyBusiness’ OU Structure present in SBS for as long as i have worked with it, is the norm for an Active Directory domain. Indeed if you go into Group Policy Management and find those OUs missing, you might think… er.. ‘this is broken!’

Like this:

In conversation with some Microsoft folks recently we found out about some, what ill call, small print, in the EULA of Essentials and Essentials R2.

If you had previously purchased Server 2012 Standard, and exercised down grade rights to install a copy of Essentials, you may be surprised to learn that ‘to the letter of the law’ you would therefore be required to purchase Server CALs and more expensively RDS CALs if you intended to use the RWA feature to remote access client computers.

Probably the best title for a blog post ever right? Having seen and read about a lot of people struggling with DNS resolution problems with their clients on Essentials (2011/2012) networks, and also some dubious advice being given out for how to ‘resolve’ these problems i thought i would try and get into some deep level explanation of how, and why Essentials does what it does.